the pomegranate tiger

Okay, after posting this --> Is this cheating? , I felt the tiniest bit guilty. I realized I wasn't really giving the system a chance. I'm going to give it another try and this time I'm going to choose at least one of my current reads with this method. Last week I came up with The Barclay Family Theatre on the random number generator and finished it over the weekend. The next number up is 15, Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte. And when I finish it, I'll remove it from the queue. So now I've done it; put it down in writing, right here on my blog for all to see. Let's see how long I can keep it up.

As some of you may have noticed, I started a Reading Queue on my sidebar as a follow-up to this post based on C Max Magee's article on The Millions . The unread books on my shelves were getting out of hand and I needed a better method of choosing the next book to read. I stumbled onto Magee's method and decided to give it a go. I've had mixed results. I listed all the unread books on my shelves; I alphabetized them by title; I put them all on a spreadsheet and numbered them; I fed the data into the Random Number Generator (actually, it's called the Integer Generator, but who except mathematicians would call it that); et voila, out spits the number of the next book I'll read. One little problem. There's a try "Again!" button. When I'm not in the mood for the book that comes up, I tend to hit "Again", again and again. Is that cheating? Methinks it is.

One of the blogs I've discovered over the last couple of years is The Millions (A Blog About Books) . It's well-written, interesting and about, well, books. I hadn't visited in awhile, so when I went back, I decided to read some earlier Notable Posts (yes, there's an actual section called "Notable Posts"). The title, The Reading Queue Revisited , caught my eye. Like most avid readers, the owner of the blog (C. Max Magee), has a large stash of books on his shelves that he hasn't read and needed a way to get through, hopefully, in his lifetime. I can relate. Just look at the four books I purchased a couple of blogs ago. They've now arrived and join the dozens of unread books already on my shelves and nightstand. This compulsion to accumulate books is somewhat akin to my aunt's post-Depression Era habit of picking up and saving every bit of string, paper and bag – just in case. Heaven forbid I'd be without reading material if some catas...